


a sound, like bells, in the darkness

by TourmalineGreen



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-23
Updated: 2019-07-17
Packaged: 2020-03-13 05:15:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18934180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TourmalineGreen/pseuds/TourmalineGreen
Summary: Rey, the Abhorsen, has been called beyond the wall to the Old Kingdom on a quest she doesn't understand, asked to wield a power she never wanted.  Kylo, the man she finds trapped in Death, is grateful to be saved and swears to defend her on her journey. What waits for them in the city is anyone's guess.  And what lurks inside both of them is yet to be discovered...





	1. Chapter 1

* * *

 

She’d never asked for this. The burden, the privilege. Her strange other-ness that calls her across the wall, far from the comforts and the only life she’d known. Only known that, when the call had come, she had answered. An orphaned girl, with only the dead to guide her.

The spirit she calls mother comes to her, offering advice, of a sort. Three folded boats, dotted with a drop of her own blood, cast onto the gray waters of death. A message to the past, never answering the questions she wants to know.

Who is she?

Who is her father, her true mother?

Did they know what she was, when they left her? Had it been for her own protection, or their cowardice?

Rey doesn’t know

Likely as not she’ll never know. Even for her, there are places from which the dead will not speak to her.

Now, though, her body still aching from the uneven paperwing landing, Rey surveys the strange, perfectly round hole into which she has fallen. Crashed. The funeral ships line the circumference of the structure. She examines them, walking slowly to ease her aching muscles, checking for broken bones as she goes, grateful to find only sprains and bruises.

Then something tugs at her. One of the ships: Smaller, unfinished. Ships never meant to set sail in the waters of life, only made for a respectful passage into death. Their cargo precious and meant to be untouched.

But this one.

This one is… different.

Rey examines the smaller ship, and cannot discern where the strange feeling is coming from. There’s nothing remarkable about it; it’s remarkable only in its simplicity and plainness. Hastily-constructed. Perhaps for a sudden passing of someone…

There.

The feeling again.

Rey frowns, and circles back to the prow of the ship, her eyes adjusting to the dark as she takes in the shape that’s been carved there.

A young man. He could be her age, or a little older. It's difficult to tell, because the expression on his face, the fear and surprise, makes him look younger. 

It’s the work of a master carver, Rey thinks. The curls of hair, swept back from his face, are almost touchably wild. And his face, it’s more striking than beautiful. A human face, not a perfect one: Strong nose, lean angles, softly-parted mouth as if captured right at the intake of breath. Rey traces her fingers along the wood, frowning as she finds a split in the material. A cut, like the slash of a carver’s blade, running down from brow to cheekbone, narrowly missing the eye.

She finds herself grieving the injury to such a face. Wondering what color eyes the carver imagined, when he or she put blade to wood…

And then, abruptly, Rey realizes she’s standing close enough to make out the rest of him in the darkness. The rest of his body… which is nude, just as exquisitely carved. Her eyes dart across his broad chest, his hips, his penis, before darting away, like she’s been caught staring at a man, not a simple carving.

What is that feeling? Why does death beckon her closer?

Rey reaches out once again, brushing her fingertips across the forehead of the figure. At once, the Charter mark springs to life—impossible, and yet glowing like the moon. She lets out a breath that's half-laugh, half-bewilderment. 

Someone has trapped him here. A spirit, trapped on the border of death itself. A body, frozen in wood. This was not exquisite carving, but masterful spellwork. She could leave him alone; it might be the kinder thing, to wait for death to weaken it eventually, sweep it away to forgetting and final rest. Sometimes a spirit that had been trapped as long as this one wasn't the same when it came back out. And this one felt... old. Not ancient, but weary and tired. 

There's terror, too, ringing like the echo of a bell from a century or more long gone. 

Terror, in the man's face. 

She can only go on instinct. It's instinct that makes her ready her bells. Makes her feel for the boundary in her mind. 

Rey closes her eyes, and allows the current to wash over her.

 

* * *

 

Moments later, when she awakes back in the land of the living, Rey feels winded, sore again from how she’d fallen backwards on the stone. She tries to catch her breath, but can’t.

Then, above her. A groan of pain. A sharp intake of breath.

There’s a solid weight on her chest, pressing her down. The weight of a body. A very alive, very confused, very naked male body.

And the alcove where the figurehead once had been is empty.

 

* * *

 

 

"I don't remember."

That's all the man can say, her dead man, her wooden man, now brought back to life. His face is ashen, and he sits there by the spring in her borrowed shirt, which hangs billowy on Rey but fits tightly across his shoulders. There were no trousers that fit. Rey tries not to stare at his bare thighs.  

"I don't remember."

"But surely you must—"

The man lets out a growl—frustration, not rage. He rakes his huge hand through his black hair, just as wild and waved and swept back from his face as it had been in his wooden form. "I would tell you, if I could just _remember_."

"I'm sorry," Rey says.

For lack of anything better to do, she picks through her bag again, finding another folded parcel, waxed cloth parting to reveal dried slices of sweet harvest apples. She hands them over to him, and he takes them, giving her a grateful nod. 

As she does, their fingertips brush. And Rey looks up into his eyes. _Dark like amber,_ she thinks. 

He looks away. 

"Thank you." 

"You must've been trapped there for some time," Rey muses, trying to keep a lighter tone, "if you're so hungry..."

The man pauses mid-bite and glances at her. Nods in agreement. "I suppose."

He devours two more of the dried apple pieces, and washes it down with a swig of spring water. 

As he eats, Rey thinks back to the man's first muddy words. The way his eyes had swept past her face, down to the distinctive blue of her coat. 

_Thank you... Abhorsen..._

He knew what she was, then. That was all he seemed to know. 

"Tell me," the man says, with a wild sort of look in his eye, as if suddenly remembering a dreadful truth. "Who rules the kingdom?"

Rey blinks at him. "No one."

"A regency, then, perhaps—"

"No one rules," Rey says. "The royal family is dead. They were all murdered... two hundred years ago, or more."

Rey watches as his face fell. Grief falls across his eyes, a wetness in them, such unspoken sadness. _He's been trapped as a figurehead, trapped in death, for more than two hundred years..._ Rey cannot conceive of it. 

The man sits frozen for a moment longer, and then, catching his breath as if only just remembering how to breathe, he looks down at the fruit and cup in his hands. 

"I will go with you, then," he says, voice dull and shot through with pain. "Be your... sworn sword-hand, if you'll have me."

"I have no need—"

"I have nowhere to go," he says. "No... family. Nobody. If what you say is true then everything I know is gone. And I— I want to be of use. In some way."

No family. 

The words cut through her as surely as a blade. 

"Please."

Rey looks up into his eyes once more. The mark, the split in the wood, is now a stripe of a healed scar that travels the same path on his face. She wonders, now, which came first: The split in the wood, or the scar... And yet something—that strange feeling—tugs at her. Not a spirit trapped in death, not any longer. But a soul trapped in grief. 

There's something he's not saying. Maybe something he can't say; spellwork is strange, bindings powerful. Something could be hiding his own memory from him, something could be—

"Please, Abhorsen."

"All right," she concedes. And then, shifting uncomfortable on the stone, Rey stands. "Let's get you something to wear." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Moodboard by the AMAZING moodyspaceprince on Tumblr. Thank you so much!! [https://moodyspaceprince.tumblr.com/post/185113733966/a-sound-like-bells-in-the-darkness-by]


	2. Chapter 2

The memory of being trapped in death has settled on his shoulders like a king’s mantle. Heavy and leaden and impossible to remove.

He follows her—the Abhorsen, who is a slip of a thing, a girl who must be ten years his junior, with messy brown hair half-back in a knot and eyes like the green-brown softness of a quiet forest—up to one of the ships.

It feels wrong to go through the chests set aside for a funerary ship, but he’s a dead man, so he has a right to them, in a strange sort of way. The Abhorsen doesn’t look at him, despite how ridiculous he must look, clad in a too-small shirt and nothing else. And she, with her bruises and her bells on, looks like she’s seen some sights far worse than him. But, inside, they find clothing to fit him: A pair of black trousers, well-made and a little high in the waist; a black jacket, with a high collar and flat, pleated sleeves into which he slides his shirt-clad arms. A belt, and a second, lower belt, which carries one of the swords she finds, and hands to him.

It’s one of the royal swords. A hand-and-a-half hilt, a crossguard set with rough-hewn rubies, blood-red. Folded steel that betrays a tell-tale ripple when he pulls it out to examine it. These items have been left here, laid to rest beside a body that’s long decomposed. Garments made for a funeral. Seems fitting for a dead man to wear them.

He dresses.

She doesn’t watch.

He thinks, she’s seen worse—and worse probably included his naked, immobile body, so. He is careful around her, respectful, cautious. Clearing his throat and waiting for her to turn around and see him.

When she does, she rakes her eyes down his form, and back up again, then nods, once.

“We’ve got to find a way out of this sinkhole.”

He nods.

Inside, his belly is writhing with unspoken lies. There are plenty of things he knows, has remembered, his past coming back to him like drops of oil surfacing in a murky, polluted lake. He doesn’t know it all, but—

He knows enough.

What he’s seen. What he’s done.

Who he is. The monster, coiled inside of him.

“You don’t remember how you got here,” the Abhorsen says, her voice growing a bit sharp, an exasperation born of pain and tiredness; “I don’t suppose you remember any way out of here, do you?”

“I—” he halts his automatic response. “Yes. Stairs. I remember the stairs.”

Her eyes light up.

* * *

They climb. With useless, aching legs, they climb. The stones are worn and narrow, and he feels like he ought to be grateful to move after centuries of imprisonment, but he’s tired, so tired. Imagine sleeping, but not resting. A endless, blank nothing. No dreams, no hope.

The memory of that place makes him want to howl. But he is silent, as is the Abhorsen, as they climb. Leaving the wrecked paperwing behind in Holehollow.

Leaving behind his innocence, his ignorance.

The veil lifts, as he rises.

He finds he does not like that, or want that, or welcome that at all.

It is only when they at last reach the top, to find that the sun is somehow overhead, an overcast midday by the looks of it, that he thinks about what it means to be truly awake now, in this new and frightening world.

There ought to be villages, people. In his time, there were green and growing things. Now the fields lay fallow on the hillside, the part of the land he can see that isn’t dappled in sluggish mist is grey and forlorn.

It’s like the world he knew… it’s all been wiped away. Everything is gone, save for his dark thoughts, his cursed memories.

The Charter is still here, though. Woven into the roots of the earth, seared on every stone. He can feel it, but it’s distant. His mark throbs a bit on his forehead, and he bites back the revulsion he feels at the sensation. It calls out to him, tempts him; whatever it was that dripped its venom in his veins is still alive in this dead world. He wishes he had bells, not to ring, but to quiet; instead, it's in his skin, in his bones, in his marrow. He is flesh and blood and pain and rage. 

She must never see it. 

No more magic. He will have none of it, not any longer.

Not after what he’s done.

* * *

All-black is not a practical choice in late autumn, or at least, wouldn't have been, in his day, but the sun has somehow weakened in this pallid future in which he’s awoken. Sweat trails down his back from exertion, but the wind snaps sharply at the edges of the cloak he’d found, and tied over one shoulder. Wearing it more for storage than for necessity.

“Where are you heading next, Abhorsen?”

She frowns. He does not understand; he’s said it respectfully, giving her the deference she is due. She’s the Abhorsen.

“My name is Rey.”

“Yes…” he says, “And—”

“Please just call me Rey,” she says, rubbing at the nape of her neck, wincing from the ache. He has the sudden and absurdly inappropriate urge to rub it for her, to ease her pain; he keeps his hands at his sides. “It’s easier that way.”

“All right,” he says.

“And… your name?” she continues, turning those eyes—even more luminous here in the muted daylight—back to his. “Do you remember?”

He does.

It’s one of the things he truly wishes he didn’t remember.

_(The blood, and the silver cup. The sinuous voice, curling around him like steam. The knife, the heart-rending feeling of wrongness, echoing through the Charter, shattering him. What has he done, what has he done—)_

His mouth feels like it’s full of poison, his tongue barbed and full of thorns. His name cuts at him; he half expects to taste blood when he tries to form it.

And it won’t come.

The—Rey’s eyes are keen, perceptive. “The binding,” she says. “You can’t say it.”

He shakes his head. “Call me… Kylo.”

Her face shifts, confusion evident on her fine features. She’s too beautiful, he thinks, to have such an echo of grief about her. Too young.

In his time, the Abhorsen had been an old man. Respectable, calm, kind...

He feels her bristling at the situation with a pained sort of wrongness, disrespect, self-loathing in his marrow.

He does not know if the old language is still studied, but if it is, if she knows it, then she knows what that word means.

“Kylo,” she says. “All right. I’m heading to Takodana.”


	3. Chapter 3

Here is what Rey does not tell him: Every night, for as far back as she can remember, a figure in black has appeared in her dreams. When the creature had come to her, back at Jakku College, terrifying the girls and bringing its message, Rey had convinced herself that it had been this figure she’d dreamed of, all the while. Perhaps her mind, or some magic, had given her that dream as a premonition.

It had indeed been a figure, human-shaped but cut out of the very darkness itself. And if the appearance, the feeling of it, hadn’t quite been the same as her dreams, well… Magic was strange. Inexplicable. Maybe these things were meant to be symbolic, not literal. She’d dreamed of a dark figure appearing, and it had appeared. The details—the silver symbol on the figure’s chest, the glowing charter mark on its brow, the faintest hint of smoke curling from its mouth—must’ve been inconsequential.

Rey remembers drawing the Charter symbols for peace and silence, remembers how the girls had fallen back to their beds on either side of the long dormitory room. The figure had stepped forward, and from its rough-spun bag, the bells and sword and surcoat had come.

Rey does not tell him that.

She doesn’t tell him about the voice, calling to her from beyond the first gate.

_Rey! Take the bag!_

A voice she hadn’t known, but had recognized. Almost.

Because everyone knows the title of Abhorsen is passed down through the bloodline. But had it been her father, her mother, an uncle, some distant relation who had summoned her? Rey doesn’t know. She feels adrift, has felt so since understanding what she truly was.

At Jakku college, her teachers had seen the Charter mark on her bow and instructed her, and she’d taken to it like a duck to water. What had been a source of joy for an orphan had, in that moment, become a source of immeasurable pain.

She doesn’t tell him how it had gutted her to learn she must go away, head north, to the Old Kingdom, to follow the call that had summoned her, the strange mystery. How strange the crossing had been, how much like a homecoming it had felt like, a homecoming to a past she could not decipher. And how, when she had seen him in his black clothing, a cold shiver of something far past recognition had coursed down her spine.

The figure in black.

(She also does not tell him, and barely admits to herself, how she had felt, coming back into her body to find his laying atop her. How solid and heavy, how much it should’ve been uncomfortable. How his skin had warmed under her touch. Those are definitely not thoughts she feels keen on sharing.)

* * *

Instead, Rey keeps it all to herself.

Instead, she rolls out the precious map for him, and bids him come and show her the way.

The overland route wouldn’t have changed much from Kylo’s time, but as his finger prods the map gently, explaining the journey, Rey finds herself growing even more weary than before. Find horses, ride to this town, then to the next, then the next. If she had only managed to save the paperwing, they wouldn’t be in this situation.

If she hadn’t crashed in Holehollow, she’d still be alone.

Rey isn’t sure what to make of him, the man who calls himself Kylo and speaks with such put-on deference that it surely has to be an act.

As they sit and eat lunch, the little orange-and-white tabby appears once more. Rey is overjoyed; she’d assumed the poor beast had been flung from the craft as she’d gone down, but here it is again, making its odd little chirping noises, as if it has a full and quite critical review of her flying performance.

“I know, I know,” Rey says, exasperated as the cat rubs up against her legs and then shies away from her searching touch. “I know. I should be more careful. But it was my first attempt, you know.”

Rey and her dark-robed traveling companion are crouched before a little fire, one he’d obediently gone and fetched tinder for and built before she could even ask for help. She looks up at him, across the fire to where Kylo is sitting.

His face is drawn. Tight. His dark eyes fixed on the cat. Something like fear flickers in his eyes.

“What?”

“Where did you find that?”

She scoffs, softening. “You don’t like cats?”

 _“That’s_ not a cat.”

It’s such an absurd assertion, Rey has to laugh. “What?”

“It's a magical construct,” he says, briefly forgetting—allowing himself to forget, or his concern for her overriding his sense of self-preservation—that he’s not meant to remember as much as he’s letting on.

Rey’s hand pauses in the tabby’s fur. The little cat purrs deeply, but turns and looks over its shoulder, right at Kylo. As if it knows. As if it’s pleased he’s noticed.

“Can’t you feel it?”

Rey frowns.

(Kylo feels it, the moment she lets go and dips into the Charter. He pushes his awareness of her down, down, buried beneath as iron a shield as he can muster; he always was good at building walls, and with her, it’s no challenge. She’s as nimble as a little fish in the water, darting this way and that in the stream of magic. And the cat-creature she’s petting, surely she must’ve felt it, seen that every strand of its fur is a tightly-knit link of Charter sigils. The warmth of its body, an illusion.)

“Where did you get it?”

“It followed me,” Rey says, “shortly after I crossed the wall—”

“You’re from across the wall?” His dark brows draw together, tone almost imperious, accusatory, as he says it.

“I’m a citizen of the Old Kingdom,” Rey replies, “If that’s what you’re asking. I was born here, but went to school just beyond the wall. Shall I get my passport out for you to inspect?”

“No, no, I wasn’t—I was just curious, that’s all.”

Back to deferential, back to meek and cowed. He bows his head, and picks up a stick to prod the fire. Rey feels her face warm, feels that familiar, hated sensation of being shown a gap in her understanding. An Abhorsen without a mentor was hardly an Abhorsen at all. How was she meant to make it to Takodana, to investigate what draws her to the city she's never seen, with such monumental things yet to learn? Not just in training, but awareness. She was a citizen of the Old Kingdom, yes, but for all intents and purposes she was as soft and ignorant as any girl raised far south of the wall. A girl who could coo at a cat, and never think to check it further. 

_You'll have to be quicker. Smarter, better, faster than whatever threats may appear._

_So far, you've only fought the wind, and look how well that went._

_Failure. Go back, turn around, leave this mess, this wasteland place, for someone more qualified._

Rey reaches for the map, picking it up as if to examine it, just to give her hands something to do. She would not listen to her doubts. 

"Ab—” He halts himself, corrected: "Rey. Do not fault yourself. The enchantment is... very well done."

"I'm not," she lies. "Anyway, we ought to keep moving." 

He ducks his head, obedient and silent once more. 

* * *

It isn;t until later, hours later, that Rey realizes the implications of what _he_ had noticed, and _she_ had not. 

As powerful as she was, as richly as the Charter flowed in her blood, it flowed just as strongly, if not more so, in his veins. And she does not know whether that fact comforts her, or frightens her.  

So she does not speak of it, and the pair of them keep going. Followed by the cat-creature, who alternates between dancing over the stones and disappearing into the underbrush, ostensibly to catch some little creature for its next meal. Rey shivers, and pulls her cloak higher against the bite of the wind. 

Nowhere to go but onwards. 


	4. Chapter 4

It takes them two and a half days to make it to the port city of Takodana. Kylo feels his stomach sink as they approach, the visual evidence of how much has changed since his time. How much the dead have taken from the living. 

In his day, Takodana had been a prosperous port-of-call into which silks and furs and spices came from all across the Kingdom, and beyond it. The city had sprawled outwards, far past the old town’s walls at the heart, which were never closed. Merchants and traders had lined the roads in both directions, wagons rolling slowly and steadily over the cobblestone streets. Children had laughed and played, darted around the little squares, begging a coin or dancing a jig or, on occasion, thieving or wheedling a fresh apple to munch on as they played their games. It had been a good place, a wealthy and content place. 

Now, they walked for miles through what had once been homes and fields, now only blight and ash and ruin. The cobblestone streets were blackened, twisted. Distorted, as if moved by the roots of ancient trees that pushed like fingers beneath the earth, shaping and breaking. And yet there was little alive, only tufts of brown grasses, the lone call of a crow. 

Takodana’s Charter stone must be broken, for the dead to overtake it. The city, what remained of it, was now cramped and hidden behind the old town’s walls. The gates were shut. 

The sight of it made him feel nauseous. Some of the sensation was from the disorientation he felt, being alive again, seeing it so changed, but some of it was from the unmistakable presence of death nearby. It lurked, waiting to spring, weak and unable to move in daylight. And he saw that beside him, the young Abhorsen clearly felt the same. How could she not? The Charter swam in her blood, same as his. Although she was not truly from here, clearly not raised here, not that he faulted her for it. She likely could not help it, and so perhaps part of his charge—although he had not explained it as such—was to guard her when her well-intentioned ignorance led them into disaster. 

Kylo does not know how one so young and untrained had come to bear this burden, bear the bells and the duty of the Abhorsen. The Charter tugged on his awareness, as it always did, walking beside her; she was bright to his writhing dark. She had not sensed what the cat-thing was, and clearly did not see what was hiding in plain sight within him, either. 

Well, for her sake, if for no one else’s, he would keep it that way. 

Let dead things die. Wasn’t that her highest calling? He would stay with her, to protect her from whatever might come—and by the scent of it, the dead were here, waiting in whatever shadowy places for sun to dip below the horizon—and, if he was very lucky, to lay his own demons to rest, too. 

Rest. It was more than what he deserved. 

“Will they open the gates for us?” she asks him—and it strikes him how young she sounded, how uncertain. She looks over at him. 

“For you,” he says. “Once they see the bells…”

“Right.” She nods. “Of course…”

There’s a sense of expectation still coming from her. Kylo represses a sigh, and begins to speak: “In my time, this was a thriving city. Merchants and… many people. If this is what has happened to this city, then I fear for the Kingdom.”

“Who was king, in your day?”

Kylo swallowed back a word. It felt as if… something at his throat was holding it in, the thing he was about to say. Spellwork, he thinks. His body is awakened, but he can’t yet—

“There was a queen,” Kylo gets out, hearing his own voice grow faintly raspier, faintly lower, as he struggles for the right words to say, words he is allowed to say. “and a… prince consort.”

“Oh?” Her eyes widen. “We studied… forgive me, what was the Queen’s name, then? I know I read it at some point, I just never assumed I’d need to—”

“Leia,” Kylo says. “Her name was Leia.”

“Queen Leia,” Rey says, nodding. “And Han, the Prince Consort, yes, I remember that.”

Oh, how he truly enjoys the sound of her voice—anything other than the low, incessant rush of death would be preferable, but her voice especially is… calming to him, and yet makes him feel alive and aware and awake in a way he can’t—

But he really wishes she would stop talking, now. 

They walk on. 

“And I suppose all of the royal line is gone,” Rey says, turning her face up to the sky, squinting at the weak sunlight, wrinkling her nose as she does so. “That’s what the historians all theorize, anyway. Unless there’s a bastard or some unaccounted-for line running about.”

“There’s plenty of bastards in the world,” Kylo says, with more malice than he means to imbue into his words. “You’ll learn that soon enough.”

Rey stops speaking abruptly and looks over at him. “What?”

“Forgive me, I meant no disrespect.”

“Kylo, what do you mean?” Her forest-soft eyes are perceptive, too keenly trained on him. “Do you…”

“Hold!” 

A loud cry from the top of the wooden barricade about forty meters ahead of them startles both of them into still alertness. On instinct, Rey’s hands fly to her bells, but Kylo has his sword drawn and has stepped in front of her with a fierce fluidity that leaves her shocked and a little impressed. His stance is low and practiced: A soldier, a warrior. 

Her warrior. 

There’s no warning before the arrows come sailing towards them. None that Rey can perceive, anyway. But Kylo is already in motion, drawing a wide circle with his blade, a glowing orange shield, shimmering in the air, sparking at the places where the arrows come sailing through. 

“Hold your fire!” Kylo roars. “We come as friends!”

There’s some commotion, some discussion, up on the barricade. Kylo holds the shield, though. He does not let it drop. 

No more arrows fly. The man up top ducks down, and another one arises; Rey can see him, dressed in a darker cloak, which the wind now whips about him.  

Rey gathers her courage to step ahead of him and speak her name, state her business, but Kylo does it first, before even the man can speak.

“This is the Abhorsen,” he says, voice carrying and powerful, a voice made for a battlefield. “Is this the welcome you show her?”

The man on the barricade stills; only his cloak moves, tugged this way and that by the sea-wind. 

“We wish to speak to your Elder!” Rey calls out, but her voice doesn’t carry as far as his does. 

So she steps forward, trusting her instinct. Letting them see her: The distinctive bells, the blue and silver keys of her surcote. Kylo can sense it, the moment the man's tension breaks, the moment his fear quiets; he drops his shield, then, and sees that the portion of the barricade starts to move. 

"Let me go first," Kylo turns, glancing down at Rey who stands beside him. Fear is evident on her face, and he hates that someone so lovely, so kind, ought to have the burden she carries. 

She should be living in a warm and comfortable home, he thinks. The vision of it, absurd and soft and peaceful, taunts his mind: The thing he can never have, and shouldn't want, and doesn't deserve. 

"May I?"

Rey nods. 

Kylo sheathes his sword, but keeps his hand on the hilt. 

Together, they walk into what's left of Takodana. 


	5. Chapter 5

Rey enters the city warily, with all of her senses and awareness on high alert. 

The village Elder, a scraggly wisp of a man who looks like he could be anywhere from fifty to eighty, greets her with a test of her Charter mark—not rudely, but matter-of-factly, a gesture Rey herself echoes. The elder nods when he finds her uncorrupted, and does the same to Kylo at her side. Rey feels a faint prickle of… something… before focusing her attention back on the village, and the people who surround her. 

Their eyes are watchful, wary, but hopeful. 

And there is death, here—lurking in the shadows of a ruined building, slinking in the gutters at her feet. The lesser dead, Rey can sense. Still dangerous, but less urgent. 

She will root them out, and cleanse this place. 

Her eyes fix on one of the small children, red-haired and dark-eyed, clutching at her mother’s skirts, looking up at Rey. Rey steps forward, and crouches down before the little girl. 

“Hello,” she says. “I’m Rey. Who might you be?”

The girl doesn’t speak. Her mother nudges her forward with her knee. 

“Go on,” the mother says, gently, her voice tinged with a hint of embarrassment.

“Arashell,” the child says. It’s little louder than a whisper, but it makes Rey smile.

“Pleasure to meet you, Arashell,” Rey says. “Do you mind if I take a look around your village? See if everything’s all right?”

Arashell hesitates, and looks up at her mother for guidance. Then she looks back at Rey. “There’s a… a dark thing, sometimes—”

“Ara,” her mother says sharply.

“No, it’s all right.” Rey straightens up, and looks at the mother.The woman looks tired, worn ragged but no older than mid-thirties. Like all the rest of them she is hungry and thin and fearful. “A dark thing—what does she mean?”

“Two nights ago, one of our fishermen went missing,” the Elder says. “Since then, there’s been a strange presence around his home.”

Rey squares her shoulders, feeling nervous and eager. In their holders, the bells seemed to jump and wriggle in anticipation, silently urging her to do what must be done to help these people. 

“Take me to the home,” she says. 

The Elder nods, and gestures; the assembled crowd parts, and then she and Kylo are walking side by side, down the gently sloping cobblestone street, towards the stench of death. 

* * *

After, when the little, grubby dark thing is sent back to the waters of death, and the place is swept clean of the stench of the undead, the Elder praises her, and thanks Kylo, and the whole town looks as if they stand a little straighter, their heads held a little higher. 

Kylo nods and defers all praise to the Abhorsen. He alone, perhaps, knows what it is these people—all the Kingdom—will face, when the time is right. For he can feel it in his veins, the lingering echoes of laughter that drag him back to that terrible night. He knows what it is that will awaken, if it hasn't already. 

They give them a feast, meager but clearly so kindly meant. Fish and wilted vegetables, preserves, pickles. Rey, he sees, has a hearty appetite. He, too, does not refuse food when it is offered. The oily, sick thing inside of him, the memory itself seems to laugh and taunt. Feast now, it says, while you can. Enjoy what's left of this living world. 

He speaks little, retreats into his thoughts. Inside he feels as if he is being torn in two: One desperate desire, to flee from this place like a coward, to drag the Abhorsen with him, off across the wall, to the places she's described. They seem impossibly safe, and fantastical, and unreal; he cannot even imagine them, although he trusts her words. There, they could be happy and safe. The darkness would consume the Kingdom but they could run from it, run and run forever—

The other half of him is resigned to the fact that he cannot go. There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and he will, in time, be found. 

Better to walk towards certain death, sword in hand, head held high, than run from it. 

Besides, he'd tried running once before. That was why he'd been imprisoned—pure, foul cowardice.  Now it's time to face what's yet to come. 

But that doesn't mean she has to die, too. 

Valiant girl. 

Bright and sweet, a golden Charter-light to lead him out of the darkness. What happens when the darkness consumes her, too? 

After the feast, they are shown to a little home, musty but swept clean and made ready for guests. The Elder apologizes for the state of their accommodations—"Surely the Abhorsen, and her swordsman, deserve much finer housing,"—but Rey smiles and thanks them as if he's just offered them a palace. 

There is one room in the house. 

One room, two narrow cots—thank the Charter. He does not think that he could share a bed with her and not wish to roll into her arms, or draw her into his. A foolish hope, a sick one, perhaps, born of the same desperation that made him want to eat and drink and drown his sorrows. It's been a hundred years, after all, since he's felt a woman's touch. 

This woman is not for him. 

So Kylo lays in the narrow cot with Rey to his left, listening to her breathing become deeper, more even. 

She sleeps at last. 

He does not—cannot sleep. 

For a long time, they’d lay there in silence; he had not known what precisely troubled her, prevented her from finding rest in the saggy beds which were still softer than stone. By all accounts, after their journey, both of them should be asleep within moments. 

The place is clean, for now. The dead do not trouble these people. 

How soon will they return? He does not know. Sooner than any of them are prepared for, that much is clear. 

He feels her wake before he feels her move; the awareness of her, another powerful creature, is like a drug to him, like incense that entices him into a haunted chapel. He dares not follow. Only lays there, flat on his back, staring up into the darkness. The image of the dead things she’d… they’d banished together still burns behind his eyes. 

Maybe that’s why she wakes, too. 

“What’s wrong?” she murmurs. “Kylo, is everything—?”

“It’s fine,” he says, his voice careful, and low, and soft. “Go back to sleep.”

But she rolls over, and looks at him. “Kylo?”

He closes his eyes. “Nothing. I… remember what I should not, and forget what I should remember. Go to sleep, Abhorsen.”

Silence. Rey shifts in the bedsheets. “Rey,” she says—whispers. Her name. But it's almost too sweet, to achingly painful, to call her that, when he knows her death will happen—

“Go to sleep, Rey,” is his hushed reply. 

She doesn’t reply. 

And at some point, Kylo, too, slips into an uneasy rest. 

His dreams are filled with blood, and fire, and laughter which rings like bells in the darkness. 


End file.
